PC freezing

tap28

Hi,

I recently installed a 2nd hard drive, http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B003SLE8HE/ref=oss_product, to old Dell Dimension DM051, pentium 4 cpu 3.00 ghz with 1 gb of ram. Running XP Media Centre Edition.

I have noticed in the last few day the pc is getting slower and this evening when I went to turn it on it froze, screen went black.

I retired this a few times, even in safe mode, I got the same results.

I unplugged the hard drive, turned it on again and no problems working.

I guessing the new hard drive is putting to much pressure on the system.

I wonder do I need more RAM.

A mate recommended this site before to me. http://www.crucial.com/eu/systemscanner/viewscanbyid.aspx?id=6BA4693D31D926C3

What do ye think, are they any good and will this fix the problem or is it time for a new pc?

Thanks

Tap

VenomIreland

tap28 wrote: »

Hi,

I recently installed a 2nd hard drive, http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B003SLE8HE/ref=oss_product, to old Dell Dimension DM051, pentium 4 cpu 3.00 ghz with 1 gb of ram. Running XP Media Centre Edition.

I have noticed in the last few day the pc is getting slower and this evening when I went to turn it on it froze, screen went black.

I retired this a few times, even in safe mode, I got the same results.

I unplugged the hard drive, turned it on again and no problems working.

I guessing the new hard drive is putting to much pressure on the system.

I wonder do I need more RAM.

A mate recommended this site before to me. http://www.crucial.com/eu/systemscanner/viewscanbyid.aspx?id=6BA4693D31D926C3

What do ye think, are they any good and will this fix the problem or is it time for a new pc?

Thanks

Tap

It's always time for a new pc :cool:

Joking aside, download memtest from http://www.memtest.org/ and burn it to a CD, boot the CD (you may need to change boot order in the BIOS) and then run it overnight, if there's a few errors, re-test the modules one at a time to find the faulty one.
If neither are faulty, then I'm sorry but I have no idea what is happening and you will need to wait for someone else to respond to the thread.

Lu Tze

It could be the power supply, hard drives can have a high power requirement when they are spinning up as far as i know, and if your PSU was under rpessure before this could be causing the problems

Curry Addict

sounds like a heating, air flow or power problem.

check your new HDD is not blocking airflow in the case.

check the power cable routing to your new HDD, it maybe shared with other devices and u may have a 2nd set of power cables that are not loaded or lightly loaded.

check your power supply voltage levels in your bios, a low voltage level may indicate a problem with your psu.

when your pc freezes check inside the case for any component that maybe
excessivley hot.

check all your fans are free of dust, particularly the cpu and gpu fans.

marco_polo

If it is crashing while within Windows, it could be worth looking at the System Event Viewer as well just in case, as it is sometimes be able to point you in the right direction for certain types of hardware problems, like a misbehaving HDD. (And other times is quite useless ).